[david-gpu]

Last week I went to a highly-specialized tertiary clinic about further treatment for a rare medical condition that I was diagnosed and treated for as a child. The two very specialized doctors I met there confirmed a diagnostic mistake that a specialist had made ten years ago. The only reason I pursued a second opinion, ten years later, was because Google Gemini had explained to me that the specialist ten years ago had performed the wrong type of test for my condition.

Do these LLMs make mistakes? They sure do, I see it all the time. But they can also help people make breakthroughs.

And this isn't the only time that Gemini has helped me diagnose long-term health issues, either.

I am not advocating to trust anything they say blindly, but they can be a great place to form new hypotheses and learn the right terms to look for when you are unfamiliar with a subject.

[wasabi991011]

Can you elaborate on how you use Gemini to diagnose long term health issues? Considering doing the same for myself, but I have no idea what is too much vs too little information, and generally the type of prompt engineering to do.

[david-gpu]

Some folks are not going to like what I am about to say, but what I do is write down as much information that I think may be relevant as possible, trying to avoid leading the witness with any of my preconceived ideas of what may be going on. At the end, I encourage them to ask me questions to get a more complete picture of what may be going on.

After a couple of rounds of that, a picture will start to emerge. The AI will make a few XYZ hypotheses of what may be going on, some of which will make more sense to you than others. This is when you can start searching some of those terms in places like pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, including for example like diagnostic criteria for XYZ.

One of the ways I often use these AIs, not just in the context of finding possible diagnoses, is requesting them to make the case for and against hypothesis XYZ based on the data you have personally collected. Again, it's not about fully buying every thing that comes out of them, but it can help you consider angles or possibilities that did not occur to you, or that you had previously accepted/discarded without sufficient evidence. Think of them as that quirky acquaintance that knows a little bit about everything but sometimes misremembers, rather than as a god-like oracle.

And don't do all this in a single session/context. Start a new context every now and then, because otherwise it tends to go in circles as these AIs are biased towards agreeing with whatever it is you said most recently. Intentionally challenge yourself, re-evaluate the existing data from other perspectives.

Sometimes what you learn is not pleasant, but as more data becomes available, you learn to accept it. Good luck.